PCGA fucking grows a pair.

[J Arcane]

Found this story over on Shacknews:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56342

"If someone wants to leave the PC market, we'll miss you. We'll watch with admiration as your titles ship in a diluted fashion without a whole lot of game play innovation, at least until you copy the innovation that occurs on the PC. Well find the great games on PC and we'll play those."

In his closing statements, Stude declared that "PC gaming will survive. It will adjust. Certain publishers will say we're done with PC gaming. Whatever. When you leave there's six new success stories coming right in to replace you."

"The PC is still the easiest platform to develop for and it will continue to be. It certainly is the most ubiquitous device worldwide. [PCGA] is here. We're talking about [PC gaming]. We're going to address the weaknesses and come out with an industry voice for the continued health of this industry."

There's also some kinda weird stuff about standardized console emulation, but that right there is the attitude and confidence I wanted to see from a so called "PC Gaming Alliance". Prior to this they've mostly wussed the fuck out.

The full interview is at GamePolitics here. (http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/12/11/playstation-4-might-live-inside-your-pc-and-other-wisdom-pcga039s-randy-stude)

[KingGorilla]

Look on the front page again, as they ask platform holders to make PC emulators. Or a few months ago where they foresaw a future of console ports. They can suck a fat hairy one.

[Telefrog]

Nice posturing from the PCGA, but that's all it really is. Console games, on average, make more revenue for publicly held companies. That's reality. I love my PC, but I understand that the days of PC superiority are long, long gone.

Here's the only part of his comments that worry me:

GP: What about piracy? You hear so much about PC game piracy from some publishers these days.

RS: There’s a story I like to tell about the Korean market where Electronic Arts wouldn’t sell the FIFA game in Korea. There’s very few retailers to begin with in South Korea and [EA] really just all-out stopped, I think in 2005, stopped shipping directly to South Korea because of the amount of piracy. And what they ended up doing is they partnered with a local operator to make the FIFA franchise available in a market that is very receptive to sports gaming on the PC. They made that FIFA product available, but only in the digital realm where it’s a free to play, micro-transaction based game. EA said the FIFA title is generating over a million dollars a month in revenue for them. If you do the math, I think it’s been out on the market for two years, [that's] $24 million in revenues. That’s a lot of copies of a $50 game that they would have to sell to match that in an environment where if they shipped the $50 game they wouldn’t sell that many anyway because it would be pirated.


Fuck that noise. If PC gaming has to survive by becoming a microtransaction festival, I'll find another hobby.

[RandoM51]

PC gaming will never die as long as there are personal computers to game on. The more companies that pull out of the market the more lucrative it becomes for those who remain.

[KingGorilla]

It is a lamentable situation but the way PC gaming works in much of the US is in line with the PCGA. As an extension of EA, Activision, 2K's multiplatform schemes, great. But globally, consoles are a rarified luxury. Eastern Europe, much of Northern Europe, Asia are PC dominated. Piracy, an overblown issue. Especially when you look at the success Valve has had in China, Korea, Taiwan as well as Blizzard, with more creative business models. When people say "PC gaming" is dead or dying, I agree with John Davison. It is being reinvented. The retail business model that corporate America is comfortable with is what is dying. That is true of games, movies, and music. And that scares many of them shitless. Looking back 10 years ago, would you have thought that Radio Head or NiN would make the highest gross in their history, without selling a single CD in a store?

[Wackman3000]

It is a lamentable situation but the way PC gaming works in much of the US is in line with the PCGA. As an extension of EA, Activision, 2K's multiplatform schemes, great. But globally, consoles are a rarified luxury. Eastern Europe, much of Northern Europe, Asia are PC dominated. Piracy, an overblown issue. Especially when you look at the success Valve has had in China, Korea, Taiwan as well as Blizzard, with more creative business models. When people say "PC gaming" is dead or dying, I agree with John Davison. It is being reinvented. The retail business model that corporate America is comfortable with is what is dying. That is true of games, movies, and music. And that scares many of them shitless. Looking back 10 years ago, would you have thought that Radio Head or NiN would make the highest gross in their history, without selling a single CD in a store?

You speak infinite truths in your writings and I tip my hat to you sir. It will be the people who react and re-create their ideas and work with the developing and fluctuating market that will prosper in the long run, while the people vying for the usual year to year grind that will end up suffering.

I say bring on the creative ideas, it will only make our so called "dying" console back to life, if it was ever dying to begin with.

[Chris_D]

I think PC gaming is just fine, there will always be PC games. Browser based games have become wildly popular and are becoming more and more technically proficient and spanning more and more genres. Apart from that, I think the market for cutting edge PC software will continue to shrink and it will be games like the Sims or WOW that don't require the latest PC hardware that will be successful.

[H.Bogard]

PCGA : We sit on our asses all day and make fanboyish press releases!

[SilentScreams]

Ahh the old PC gaming is alive/dead chestnut.
It's the most pointless argument on the internet along with the whole DRM over-reaction.

However good consoles get, there will always be genres that a PC can do better and vice-versa. For that reason, they will both always have a purpose and neither is going to die anytime soon.

[J Arcane]

Eh. I don't really think that's true. I can't think of a single genre or type of game my PC hasn't done every bit as well as a console. THat's why I game on PC, because I get bloody everything.

Take platformers, supposedly a genre that plays best on console, yet I enjoyed the shit out of Assassin's Creed and Tomb Raider Anniversary on the PC, and all it took was a $20 Logitech dual action, which I might note, is a third the price of the going rate for a console controller this gen.

Or that whole "couch" bullshit. One of my friends has a big screen TV in his living room wired to a PC that he uses to play Guild Wars all the bloody time, while his wife sits next to him on a laptop doing the same.

It's mostly laziness and bullshit myths that keep any given genre from shining just fine on the PC.

[Banacek]

Only thing I'd take issue with is the claim that PC's are easier to develop for. I'd have to imagine that the tools MS provides for Xbox development and Windows development can't be that much. One would think that if the abstraction layers are done right, there wouldn't be much of a difference at all.

[Rilav]

Only thing I'd take issue with is the claim that PC's are easier to develop for. I'd have to imagine that the tools MS provides for Xbox development and Windows development can't be that much. One would think that if the abstraction layers are done right, there wouldn't be much of a difference at all.

the thing is, PC game development isn't constrained to just one development kit.

PC Gaming being dead/dying has been around for years, but give me a mouse and keyboard over a controller anyday.

[J Arcane]

Only thing I'd take issue with is the claim that PC's are easier to develop for. I'd have to imagine that the tools MS provides for Xbox development and Windows development can't be that much. One would think that if the abstraction layers are done right, there wouldn't be much of a difference at all.
PC development doesn't cost a fucking dime. There are no dev kits to buy at thousands of dollars a pop, no cnsole licensing fees on every game sold, nothing.

PC development is the only true indie development scene out there, where I can start a company or just a personal project for nothing out of my pocket, and sell it my damn self on the Internet.

Hell this whole "casual gaming" business that all the big publishers and console makers have finally started jumping into got started by people exactly like that, on the PC, years before the console companies even knew it was happening.

[Banacek]

PC development doesn't cost a fucking dime. There are no dev kits to buy at thousands of dollars a pop, no cnsole licensing fees on every game sold, nothing.

PC development is the only true indie development scene out there, where I can start a company or just a personal project for nothing out of my pocket, and sell it my damn self on the Internet.

Hell this whole "casual gaming" business that all the big publishers and console makers have finally started jumping into got started by people exactly like that, on the PC, years before the console companies even knew it was happening.

I'm not talking cost. I totally agree that if you and I had a great idea for a game, all we need is a C++ compiler to get started. I'm just talking ease of programming here. Then it breaks down to what type of game we're developing. 2D? Sure. 3D? Then I'd assume that we'd be using either the OpenGL or the DirectX API. The OpenGL API is free, but (for a first time developer) is a bit daunting. The DirectX API comes with access to the MSDN Library, which is one of the best things that MS has ever done. You can fault them for some things, but their documentation is always leaps and bounds better than open source project.

As it stands, the PC is still the best independent gaming platform out there, no questions about it. Anyone here have any real OpenGL experience? I'm wondering how it's been keeping up.

[J Arcane]

OpenGL is basically all but dead for gaming.

Very, very few current games use it, and some of it's biggest and staunchest supporters have begun abandoning it, like iD and Epic, and while I'd write off Epic's abandonment as mere Microsoft payola, I can't say the same about iD.

John Carmack has been probably the single most vocal and prominent supporter of OpenGL gaming, and when he jumps ship for DirectX, you know something's fucked up.

[KingGorilla]

Someone just needs to take up the torch again. The state of Open GL is also the state of non-Windows based gaming. If you are building a 3D engine, if you want to make a new game on it, are you going to worry about Mac and Linux applications? Blizzard, for example, works hard on its Open GL versions because of their large Mac presence. Not many companies have been able to make those segments of development cost effective.

I think that as Linux and Macs get into more homes, particularly the Linux usage over seas, more companies will be focussing on OpenGL. Hothead (Penny Arcade Adventures) is.

[pomeroy]

Looking back 10 years ago, would you have thought that Radio Head or NiN would make the highest gross in their history, without selling a single CD in a store?

They sold those CDs in stores, though (Radiohead's sold fantastically well in the store, too...but then again they're more relevant that NIN is). And Radiohead has stated they'll never do what they did for "In Rainbows" again.

[thomas]

John Carmack has been probably the single most vocal and prominent supporter of OpenGL gaming, and when he jumps ship for DirectX, you know something's fucked up.
They first showed off id tech 5 at a mac conference...